help all live fairly

The HALF and HALF Idea

Chris Marsh, 5 March 2008

When I got the web site called ‘home and local food’ (on 19 Nov 2006) it was to investigate how the people of Britain could grow all the food we need on the total land of Britain, or even on the land we currently occupy: our home gardens. The fact that the name of the site was the acronym ‘HALF’ was handy for naming a site folder and that kind of thing, but I didn’t think of it as only a half of a solution, and hence needing another half. Then I got involved with a campaign against a new supermarket in my small town, Dawlish, in Devon, and people were curious when I said I hadn’t wheeled a trolley round a supermarket since we moved here in 1999. I wrote a piece about that: http://www.habitude.org.uk/dawlishtellmemore.htm#whyandhow. The reason, incidentally, that this is on the ‘habitude’ site is because I began to think of supermarket shopping as a habit, a bad habit, since supermarkets have become a seemingly unstoppable force, hoovering up the resources of the planet to produce an illusion of cheapness and choice, taking advantage of the mindless ‘convenience’ of the supermarket experience, which takes people’s minds off their own responsibility for what the supermarket system ruins elsewhere on the planet, and comfortably out of sight. When I thought about how we (my husband, David, and I) avoid supermarkets – apart from the small Co-op store which it seems no one in Dawlish likes, where we spend our dividend from banking with the Co-op Bank on cat food – I realised that the ‘other half’ of our food, and household basics like loo rolls, comes from Traidcraft, a mail order company which specialises in fair trade, and also organics and recycled stuff. So the ‘half and half’ of our shopping is ‘local’ and ‘fair’, hence ‘home and local food’ and ‘help all live fairly’. It bothers me a little that these are not the same form grammatically, but I justify that with the thought that ‘home and local food’ is a principle, it’s the main and essential one; ‘help all live fairly’ is a kind of stop gap. When re-localisation – the revolutionary change which lefty groups, whether Marxist socialist, anarchist or radical green, tend now to be thinking about – has become widespread it won’t be necessary to buy stuff from afar to help out Third World growers and craftspeople. I expect there will be goods which cannot be produced on a small scale locally, but that is a different matter.

I called this initial piece ‘The HALF and HALF Idea’ because this is just the thinking it all out stage. But even if the thinking had been done, by me and by other people, because I have much more knowledge about land use and local food than about fair trade, I don’t expect half and half to be adopted at all quickly and widely. I discovered the other day an interesting rule-of-thumb for assessing the likely uptake of an idea of this kind. It was in an article in The Observer about food technologists proposing cloned cows as part of the solution for food shortages, and ‘green groups’ objecting to ‘Frankenstein foods’. The article made a point about ethical consuming generally: ‘More than 30 per cent of people claim to care about companies’ environmental and social records, for example, but only 3 per cent reflect these beliefs in their purchases.’ In general what that means is that if a certain number or percentage of people in a population know about a concern or a new solution or opportunity – and getting something like that about isn’t easy – only a tenth of those will act on it, and those few will probably go only part of the way. That kind of intertia or apathy factor operates throughout the world change movement, and results in a disparity between ideas/theory/intentions and practice. This is one of the areas I shall be exploring as this site develops.

One aspect I should make clear is that ‘help all live fairly’ is not just about Fairtrade as such, to benefit struggling people, it is also about the land, the forests and soils, and the ecology, and all plants and animals, whether domesticated or wild. It is about catering for needs one cannot meet by growing food in one’s garden and/or having an organic veg box once a week from a local grower. For true local self-reliance it is best if one’s food comes directly from plants grown vegan-organically, because livestock is very often fed on imported grains and oil-seed (soya etc.) cake. So if one wants or needs plant food cultivated using animal fertiliser, and/or food from animals: eggs, dairy products, meat, that all comes into the ‘help all live fairly’ category. So one makes a compromise for the sake of a fairer life for the hen, and chooses free-range eggs, preferably from organically fed hens, ideally scratching about contentedly no more than a walking distance away from your house.

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